Dirt Showdown is a letdown (review)

Here’s the problem with Dirt Showdown: It’s just not that good. It checks a number of boxes (most of which appear to be extreme), but there’s not enough different about it, compared with the last version of Dirt, to make it worth your time.

Dirt 3 earned 3 stars when I reviewed it on the PS3 (it was brutallyslow, but some of that, I think, is the PS3). This version, on the Xbox, is speedier, but that’s only a marginal advantage in this case. There just aren’t enough new developments, and what racing is included (Rampage! 8-Ball! Head2Head!) just isn’t that exciting. The “excitement” of figure-8 demolition derby racing wears off very quickly, and there are a lot of demolition derby-type stages combined with the occasional straight-up race, but not enough for my money.

Smashing through blocks is one of the tricks that you have to perform

BAD HANDLING: I get that smashing stuff is fun, but this game doesn’t even do that well. The cars handle kind of drunkenly, they tend to stick to any handy, nearby wall corner or traffic bollard far, and the music is a little too earnestly “alternative.”

The game’s not bad, it just doesn’t give me any reason to play it instead of Dirt 3. The big deal this time around is “joyride,” which kind of sounds like an open-world stage where you can drive around finding ramps to jump off and things to drive fast around. What it actually is is nothing that exciting. You are in an arena. There are 25 “tasks” you must perform (do a doughnut around that cement pipe; jump off that ramp, drift around this corner). You must
do them in order (if you don’t perform No. 12 correctly, No. 13 won’tbe activated). It’s the opposite of sandbox, open-world gaming.

DAMAGE MODELING IS WINDOW DRESSING: There’s a “boost meter” and you can use it to scoot past your opponents, but of course every car has it, so it’s not much of an advantage. The damage modeling on the cars is very nice, but this does nothing to improve the gameplay, so it’s just lovely window dressing on a restaurant that serves average food.

Speaking of window dressing: Oh holy Norse gods there are a metric ton of marketing tie-ins. I get that any game these days will have in-game advertising, but this game might take the cake. Every car, sign, flag, crash barrier, you name it is plastered with ads. And the ads are all for skateboard companies and the like, clearly they believe their audience is comprised largely of 14-22 year old males.

There are a lot of advertisements in the game. It’s pushed to the extreme.

ADS TO THE EXTREME: And again, that’s not horrible, it just feels like Codemasters is trying to change Dirt into a Tony Hawk-type EXTREME FRANCHISE, and that’s intolerable.

At the end of the day, Dirt Showdown 3 is not terrible, to be sure, but quite annoying and not, if I’m honest, better than the previous game in any way.
Save your money and go buy a copy of Dirt 3 if you don’t already have it.